Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard

mind was found operating, its principles unvaried. This is a long series of cases and will soon become longer.
    The reactive mind is possessed by everyone. No human being examined anywhere was discovered to be without one or without aberrative content in his engram bank, the reservoir of data which serves the reactive mind.
    What does this mind do? It shuts off hearing recall. It places vocal circuits in the mind.
    It makes people tone-deaf. It makes people stutter. It does anything and everything that can be found in any list of mental ills: psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions...
    What can it do? It can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma, allergies, sinusitis, coronary trouble, high blood pressure, and so on down the whole catalogue of psycho-somatic ills, adding a few more which were never specifically classified as psycho-somatic, such as the common cold.
    And it is the only thing in the human being which can produce these effects. It is the thing which uniformly brings them about.
    This is the mind which made Socrates think he had a “demon” that gave him answers.
    This is the mind that made Caligula appoint his horse to a government post. This is the mind which made Caesar cut the right hands from thousands of Gauls, which made Napoleon reduce the height of Frenchmen one inch.
    This is the mind which keeps war a thing of alarm, which makes politics irrational, which makes superior officers snarl, which makes children cry in fear of the dark. This is the mind which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him irresolution when he should act, and kills him before he has begun to live.
    If there ever was a devil, he invented it.
    Discharge the content of this mind’s bank and the arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly, and the whole catalogue of ills goes away and stays away.
    Discharge the reactive engram bank and the schizophrenic faces reality at last, the manic-depressive sets forth to accomplish things, the neurotic stops clinging to books which tell him how much he needs his neuroses and begins to live, the woman stops snapping at her children and the dipsomaniac can drink when he likes and stop.
    These are scientific facts. They compare invariably with observed experience.
    The reactive mind is the entire source of aberration. It can be proved and has been repeatedly proven that there is no other, for when that engram bank is discharged, all undesirable symptoms vanish and a man begins to operate on his optimum pattern.
    If one were looking for something like demons in a human mind -- such as those one observes in some inmates of madhouses -- he could find them easily enough. Only they are not demons. They are by-pass circuits from the engram bank. What prayer and exhortations have been used against these by-pass circuits!
    If one did not believe in demons, if one supposed that Man were good after all (as a postulate, of course), how would the evil get into him? What would be the source of these insane rages? What would be the source of his slips of the tongue? How would he come to know irrational fear?
    Why is it that one does not like his boss although his boss has always been pleasant?
    Why is it that suicides smash their bodies to bits?
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    Why does Man behave destructively, irrationally, fighting wars, killing, ruining whole sections of Mankind?
    What is the source of all neuroses, psychoses, insanities?
    Let us return to a brief examination of the analytical mind. Let us examine its memory banks. Here we find all the sense concepts on file. Or so it appears at first glance. Let us take another look, a look at the time factor. There is a time sense about these analytical mind banks.
    It is very accurate, as though the organism were equipped with a fine watch. But there is something wrong here about time -- it has gaps in it! There are moments when nothing seems to be filed in these standard